Please note: With the introduction of Evolution 2.22 in Ubuntu 8.04 it is now much simpler to migrate Evolution and all it's settins to another computer. With Evolution running see File > Backup Settings and File > Restore Settings.

Introduction

This document provides a quick guide to how to transfer your email and account settings from one Ubuntu computer to another with Evolution. It has been tested on Evolution versions 2.2 -> 2.4 (Hoary -> Breezy). The same procedure applies if you want to transfer your email from one user to another on the same computer. There is a plugin available for recent versions of evolution that will do this automatically for you, but if this is not available, this guide should do the trick.

Explanation

Evolution keeps its details in various places inside your home directory (~). The data is kept in ~/.evolution, the account details are kept in ~/.gconf/apps/evolution and the passwords are kept in ~/.gnome2_private/Evolution. So you need to copy all three of these directories, but there is a catch: you need to copy the data while no program is using it.

Procedure

Run these two command on both the source and the target computer (these stop the programs that might interfere with your copy):

gconftool-2 --shutdown

evolution --force-shutdown

Copy the directories ~/.evolution, ~/.gconf/apps/evolution and ~/.gnome2_private/Evolution from the source computer to the same place on the target computer.

Start Evolution on the target computer (this will automatically start the programs that you stopped in step 1).

Note: Take care not to start any Gnome applications between steps 1 and 2, as these will automatically restart the programs that you want to have stopped.